Ask any major company back in the golden age of newspapers and print media if print advertising was effective, and your question would likely be answered with a strange look. Now that alternative forms of advertising have come to the forefront, the question is appropriate. The answer, however, isn’t black and white.

Decline

There’s little question that the number of readers of print media has declined, due to advancement in technology. Many magazines, for example, experienced negative subscriber growth in the second quarter of 2010, according to Media Bistro. With a plethora of free content available for people on the Internet, readers of newspapers and magazines have chosen to seek out other ways of finding information. While the decline of print media doesn’t indicate a death blow to print advertising, it certainly means that print advertisements won’t have as large of an impact as they did prior to the popularity of the Internet.

Available Information

Print media is being phased out in favor of alternative media sources, such as TV and the Internet. According to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism in 2010, newspapers ranked just ahead of radio as a source of news. It was the first time that people went to the Internet to find news more than reading newspapers. That data obviously has negative implications for print advertising, especially if the trend continues.

Targeting

Whether print media advertising will work for your business is largely dictated by the audience you’re trying to reach. Young consumers who grew up without exposure to print media are obviously less likely to read newspapers than the older generation who grew up with print media. Taking out an ad for a technology product in a newspaper, for example, is likely to be less effective than taking out the same ad on a technology website. Advertising in magazines makes it easier to reach your targeted audience because you have the option of choosing magazines that target your audience.

Cost

While print advertising isn’t dead and is still effective -- depending on your business -- it is more costly than other forms of advertising. Lou Dubois of Inc.com explains that print advertising is often thousands of dollars more expensive than online advertising. While you may spend upwards of $50,000 for an ad in a well-circulated magazine, you’ll likely pay a fraction of that to run the same type of ad on a website that attracts similar traffic.

Impact on the Consumer

One advantage that print advertising has over other avenues of advertising is that print advertisements often make more of an impact on the reader. Take the Internet for example. Because readers of Internet content see so much information in a short amount of time, they become used to seeing the ads. People effectively become ad blind and often disregard the advertisements. That’s not the case with print advertising. Researches at Penn State University conducted a test in 1998 to gauge whether online advertisements or print advertisements were more memorable. The researchers concluded that print ads stuck with readers far more than online ads.